MATILDE MARCOLLI - California Institute of Technologymatilde/StillLifeSpacetime.pdf · 4 MATILDE MARCOLLI 2. Time and transience As it is well known, ... method to store acoustically

STILL LIFE AS A MODEL OF SPACETIME

MATILDE MARCOLLI

Contents

1. Introduction 22. Time and transience 42.1. Time as a collection of instants 42.2. Linear time as process 92.3. The flow of time and music 102.4. Decay and thermodynamic time 142.5. The algorithmic time of seashells 162.6. The flow of time as a flow of knowledge 183. Space and time 203.1. Existence as space without time 263.2. Cezanne’s curved space 273.3. Matisse’s emergent flat space 283.4. The Cubist spacetime 313.5. Dadaism: spacetime as information 333.6. Theoretical spacetimes 363.7. Cornell’s cosmic dioramas 38

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1. Introduction

Still life is the most philosophical genre of traditional figurativepainting. It saw some of its most famous manifestations in theFlemish tradition of the XVII century, but it evolved and sur-vived as a meaningful presence through much of XX century art,adopted by avant-garde movements such as cubism and dadaism.

The purpose of this essay is to dig into the philosophical mean-ing behind the still life painting and show how this genre can beregarded as a sophisticated method to present in a pictorial andimmediately accessible visual way, reflections upon the evolvingnotions of space and time, which played a fundamental role inthe parallel cultural developments of Western European mathe-matical and scientific thought, from the XVII century, up to thepresent time.

A challenge for the artists of today becomes then how to con-tinue this tradition. Is the theme of still life, as it matured andevolved throughout the dramatic developments of XX centuryart, still a valuable method to represent and reflect upon thenotions of spacetime that our current scientific thinking is pro-ducing, from the extra dimensions of string theory to the spinfoams and spin networks of loop quantum gravity, to noncom-mutative spaces, or information based emergent gravity? Somemay feel that the notions of spacetime contemporary physics andmathematics are dealing with nowadays are too remote from thefamiliar everyday objects that form the basic jargon of still lifepaintings. However, much the same could be said about the no-tions of relativistic spacetime and the bizarre world of quantummechanics that were trickling down to the collective imaginationin the early XX century, and yet the artists of the avant-gardemovements of the time were ready to jump onto concepts such

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Figure 1. Joris van Son, “Still Life of fruit”, 1663.

as non-euclidean geometry, higher dimensions, and the like, andbring them into contact with a drastic revision of what it meansto “represent” the everyday objects that surround us, and thatcome to occupy a profoundly altered concept of space and time.So, I believe, the challenge is a valid one, even in the light ofthe ever more complex landscape of today’s thinking about theconcepts of space and time, and I take the occasion to make anopen call here to the practicing artists, to take up the challengeand paint a new chapter of the “still life” genre, suitable for theminds of the current century.

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2. Time and transience

As it is well known, the other technical name of the “Still Life”genre is Vanitas. This word more aptly describes the philosoph-ical nature of these deceivingly simple images of compositions ofobjects of everyday life, as conceptual representations of the na-ture of time. Vanitas refers primarily to the transient nature oftime, the fugitive instant, the brevity of life, the ephemeral plea-sure of enjoying the reality of instantaneous moments that do notand cannot last. Upon this basic theme, tempus fugit, there liesa multilayered analysis of what one can understand as time, anelaboration that, as we shall see, parallels the many aspects oftime, as we have learnt to distinguish them within the traditionof scientific discourse.

2.1. Time as a collection of instants. First and foremost,there is the idea, which all of us maintain, that time is a col-lection of instants, each a still image, which is immediate andimmanent but without extension: the very idea of instantaneous– something which does not last. A way of representing pictori-ally this notion is by presenting a collection of everyday objectschosen for their quality of embodying the very notion of some-thing transitory, which exists only in a brief instant of time.

A good example are floral compositions. These form an im-portant element throughout the history of the still life genre. Inthe Flemish compositions, the idea of time as a collection of in-stants is often expressed by inserting in the composition a floralarrangement where the different flowers in the bouquet are knownto bloom in different seasons, at different times of the year. Thisproduces the effect of representing time not as a linearly ordered


Figure 2. Margareta Haverman, “Still Life: avase of flowers”, 1716

succession of events, or by means of a single simultaneous in-stant (which would have the effect of abolishing time completely),but through the coexistence of a plurality of instants belongingto different times. This is consistent, as modern neuroscienceteaches us, with the internal representation of time in our mem-ory, which we imagine stores a faithful recording of the linearordering of events, but which in fact resembles much more thefloral compositions of the Flemish Still Lifes, with a simultaneoussuperposition of unordered but distinct time events.

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Figure 3. Ori Gersht, “Exploding Floral Compo-sition, N.4”.

The theme of floral composition as a representation of in-stantaneous existence in time, and an embodiment of the con-cept of Vanitas, reaches its apex with the contemporary artistOri Gersht, with the “Exploding Floral Compositions”, where3-dimensional models of XIX century traditional still life floralcompositions by Henri Fantin-Latour and then exploding themand photographing them right at the moment of explosion.


Figure 4. Cornelis de Heem, “Still Life with oys-ters, lemons and grapes”, circa 1660.

We know today, thanks to the fast advancing technique offemto-photography, that one can push this idea of capturing theinstant of time to the point of photographing light itself in theprocess of moving at its extraordinary but finite speed throughvarious materials. One can view this as the modern evolution ofthe idea the still life painters of the XVII century were trying toconvey with their “collection of instants” embodied by perishableflowers in multi-seasonal floral compositions.

Other typical elements inserted in still life compositions torepresent the transient instants of time are seafood (especiallyoysters) and fresh fruit. These also conveys the idea of the per-ishable, captured in its brief moment of existence before decay,

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Figure 5. Roy Lichtenstein, “Still Life with oys-ters, fish in a bowl and book”, 1973.

suspended in an instant frozen in eternity. The use of seafoodin still life as an emblem of the perishable persists well into theXX century redefinition of the genre. It makes frequent appear-ance in Picasso’s Still Lifes and continues to be a referent for thegenre, through other artistic movements, like Pop Art, well intothe second half of the XX century.


2.2. Linear time as process. In addition to the representationof time as a collection (a bouquet) of distinct individual instan-taneous moments, another view of time pervades the traditionalFlemish still life paintings, one that relates best to our under-standing of time as a process of transformation. This image oftime corresponds to mathematically representing time as an ori-ented line, with its linear ordering providing a meaning to thenotion of before and after and of simultaneity. Much as this mayappear as a very natural notion, one should keep in mind that itis precisely its implicit notion of “simultaneous events” that waschallenged and transformed by the advent of relativity theory inthe early XX century.

A way of representing linear time as a transformation processis to include in the painting elements that unambiguously pointto a before and an after. Such are the depictions of half-eatenfruits or slices of cake, half-peeled lemons with part of the peelstill pending, toppled glasses. Each of these images describes aprocess of evolution in time, which is caught in the act of becom-ing: an action is taking place, an action that begun in the pastand that awaits completion in the future.

One can see this type of time representation in Pieter Claesz’s“Tabletop Still Life”, where, in addition to the perishables likeoysters and fresh fruit, already discussed in the previous section,several items on the tabletop display stand “in the process ofbecoming”: a half eaten mince pie, a half peeled and sliced lemon,a partly sliced loaf of bread, a half empty glass.

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Figure 6. Pieter Claesz, “Tabletop Still Life”,1625.

2.3. The flow of time and music. Time is also perceived anddescribed as a flow, and the most frequently used method for in-corporating the concept of the flow of time in still life paintingsis through a reference to music. There are various aspects of mu-sic that link it to time: unlike the appreciation of the visual art,which is essentially simultaneous and atemporal, and that onemay classify as spatial perceptions (though of course a changingpoint of view in looking at a sculpture may form an importantpart of its aesthetic appreciation), music can only be perceivedin time and through time.

Of all the traditional arts, it is the one that is more closelytied up to time. In the contemporary world, one could arguethat other art forms, such as cinema, also have a fundamental


Figure 7. Pieter Claesz, “Still Life with musicalinstruments”, 1623.

temporal component, and that so did theater already in the ear-lier times, but music, being more abstract, and having essentiallyno spatial component to it, embodies better than any other artform the image of the flow of time. In times when there was nomethod to store acoustically (not in the written form of a score) amusical performance, music would also exemplify something thatdissolves in time without leaving behind any tangible trace of itsexistence, hence connecting back to the more general idea of thetempus fugit and Vanitas themes.

It should therefore not appear surprising to see the insertion ofmusical instruments in compositions of edible goods and flowers,as all these things together collaborate in creating a complex andmultilayered description of the nature of time.

In the more modern form of the early XX century avant-gardemovement, the composition of still life paintings centered aroundmusical instruments was broadly explored by the cubist painters,

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Figure 8. Braques, “Still Life with violin”, 1914.

Braques and Picasso, most of all, but also Gris and Leger. Themusical instruments in their composition are at the center of afly-eye perspective of multiple viewpoints, which suggests multi-ple observers in space as well as multiple instants of time, seenthrough a more modern viewpoint whereby time and space havestarted to blend into two no longer separate concepts. Music isthen no longer a purely temporal art, but also an embodimentof movement, viewed as a change of observer viewpoint throughboth time and space.


Figure 9. Picasso, “Still Life with mandolin”,1924.

Figure 10. Juan Gris “Still life with Guitar”,1920.

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Figure 11. Pieter Claesz, “Still Life with skulland writing quill”, 1628.

2.4. Decay and thermodynamic time. Among the notions oftime that modern scientific thought developed, perhaps the onethat comes closest to our subjective perception, as well as to thenotion of Vanitas we have been discussing here, is the concept ofthermodynamic time. What is meant by this is the formalization,through the mathematical notion of entropy in thermodynamicas,of time as consumption and decay, and the irreversibility of thearrow of time.

This notion was implicitly there throughout the history of theStill Life genre, through the idea that a Vanitas is a reminder ofdeath and of the transient nature of life.

The decay element is often introduced in Still Life paintingsthrough a skull image placed among the ordinary objects of thetabletop arrangements, as the ultimate symbol of what is left oflife after time has run its course and completed its process of slowconsumption and decay. The skull is the ultimate pointer to theirreversibility of the time arrow.


Figure 12. Cezanne, “Still Life with skull”.

Figure 13. Picasso, “Still Life”, 1945

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Figure 14. Adriaen Coorte, “Still Life withseashell”, 1698.

2.5. The algorithmic time of seashells. There is yet anotherway in which we have come to understand the unfolding of time,which is through the processing of an algorithm, said in moderninformation theoretic language. A natural process of growth thatfollows an algorithmic regularity, which we nowadays like to thinkof in terms of cellular automata and discrete dynamical systems,is the growth of seashell. The algorithmic regularity of geometricform and patterns in sea shells have long fascinated scientists andnaturalists alike. The frequent insertion of seashell as a themein still life can be seen as describing yet another aspect of time,which is stark contrast with its view as thermodynamic decay andslow destruction. In fact, the regular geometric growth of seashellis an example of time evolution that encodes and does not loseinformation, which is to say, does not represent an increase ofentropy but of its opposite, information.


Figure 15. Max Ernst, “Sea Shell”.

The algorithmic growth of seashells is a process that represents,once again, the unfolding of time, but now in a creative ratherthan destructive form: the creation of structure and the executionof a code, a program, into a mechanism of growth. A process ofcreation and evolution of form through time.

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Figure 16. Adam Bernaert, “Vanitas”, 1660.

2.6. The flow of time as a flow of knowledge. Time is alsoperceived as the vehicle for the accumulation and transmission ofknowledge, represented by the reading and writing of books: themain instruments for the storage and acquisition of knowledgeever devised in human history.

Several Still Life paintings include collections of books, partlyopened, as if in the process of being read, and often accompaniedby writing instruments, representing the process of transforma-tion that leads to the production of new knowledge.

Altogether, all these different representations of time encodedin various collections of objects in the Still Life compositionsreveal a remarkable complexity of philosophical concepts, com-pletely in tune with what the thinkers of the time, be it Descartesor Spinoza in the XVII century or Boltzmann and his concept of


Figure 17. Unknown Dutch Master, “Still Lifewith Books”.

entropy, between the XIX and the XX century, and later Einsteinand the newly emerging notions of spacetime in the early XX cen-tury. We have so far focussed on concepts of time. We now turnour attention to how the Still Life genre has been expressing theconcept of space.

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Figure 18. Hans Holbein, “The Ambassadors”(detail), 1533.

3. Space and time

The XVI and XVII century saw a profound revolution in ourunderstanding of the concept of space, which sees its focal pointin Decartes and the origin of our modern idea of analytic geom-etry: the idea of space as a quantifiable entity, as specified bycoordinates, by a frame that permits quantitative measurementsof relative positions, not only of distance and extension.


Instruments of representation of space thus begin to appear inStill Life compositions, as in the detailed tabletop arrangementof mathematical instruments in Holbein’s famous painting “TheAmbassadors” (which is in itself not a Still Life, but it incorpo-rates compositions in the Still Life genre, along with the portraitand the prominent skull anamorphosis, in an elaborate dialog ofspatial connections).

As part of the Cartesian concept of coordinate frames, oneacquires the possibility of describing space as dynamical, and po-sitional relations as evolving in time according to laws of motion.This in time developed into the edifice of classical mechanics,with its Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalism, with positionand phase space and with motion described by trajectories ofpoints in a coordinate frame.

By the end of the XIX century, this conception of space hadevolved to a very high level of sophistication, with curved spaces(Riemannian manifolds) and their non-Euclidean geometries co-existing with the original flat and homogeneous Euclidean space.It is against this background of geometric knowledge that the nov-elty of special and general relativity in physics came to establisha new conception of spacetime, but this also set the stage uponwhich the language of modern art was developed. The concept ofspace as evolving and unfolding in time became a crucial themein the art of the early XX century, especially through Futurism,and the use of the familiar objects in the Still Life representationbecame a way of exploring the dynamical properties of space, asin Boccioni’s famous “development of a bottle in space”.

In the Dutch Still Life of the XVII century, a great atten-tion is given to spatial relations between the displayed objects,

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Figure 19. Boccioni, “Development of a bottle inspace”, 1912.

where they stand in relation to one another, relative to an ab-solute background coordinate frame fixed by the environmentalelements: tabletop, walls. In the transition to XX century art,the objects of Still Life compositions begin to define space itselfthrough their properties of volume (Cezanne) or color (Matisse).

The idea of defining space through the volumetric and rela-tional properties of the displayed objects persists well into thecentury. Guttuso creates a space primarily through a relationalrepresentation of volumes realized by a collection of everyday ob-jects, but the presence of a barely sketched background, where adark area on the right side suggests the opening up of a largerspace behind, creates a dialog between the relational space andan absolute frame of reference. In addition, he makes an addi-tional political statement, in transferring the mundane objects


Figure 20. Guttuso, “Still Life with cans”.

of still life composition from bourgeois household to proletarianworkplace. On the other hand, the 1947 Picasso still life achievesa further level of abstraction in the genre, where the depiction ofspace is openly seen as the ultimate goal, the objects transformedinto unrecognizable volume-shapes whose manifest purpose is thecreation of space, along the line of our relativistic conceptions,according to which matter bends the geometry of space, hencecreating gravity, which in turn influences matter in a dynamical

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Figure 21. Picasso, “Still Life”, 1947.

way. Space in this still life is created by massive volumes withno other meaning left but their bending of spacetime itself.

Along with the traditional elements of Still Life compositions,the XX century introduces new “objects”, especially machines.Especially Fernand Leger, who in his Ballet Mecanique had ex-plored the poetry and musicality of machines and their essentialability to define space through their movement and shape, re-sorted frequently to the use of the machine as an element of StillLife composition, precisely to the purpose of a conceptualizationof space.


Figure 22. Fernand Leger “Still Life in the Ma-chine”, 1918.

Space becomes defined by the machine and it resides in themachine, which is again a dynamical entity, based on rhythmicmovement and repetition.

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Figure 23. Morandi, “Still Life”, 1929-1930

3.1. Existence as space without time. In contrast with thedynamical space of the Futurists, there is an absolute stillness,which can only be defined as space in the absence of time, whichemerges in the many Still Life paintings of Morandi, mostly ar-rangements of bottles, vases and glass containers on a barelydefined tabletop, with usually no other clear delimitation of sur-rounding space. It is an indefinite space, an apeiron, as far as thebackground framing is concerned, while it is a tightly bound im-age of proximity relations in the cluster of objects occupying anddefining the center stage of the painting. There is little room forboth volume and color to play a role in these paintings, where thedepth of space is meager and a diffused light permeates a mutedbalance of ochre tints. Space here is absolute stillness.


Figure 24. Cezanne, “Rideau Pichet”.

3.2. Cezanne’s curved space. Throughout the history of philo-sophical thinking about space, as well as in the concepts of mod-ern physics, one repeatedly encounters a dialectical counterposi-tion between a relational and an absolute notion of space. In therelational viewpoint, space itself is created by the interactionsbetween matter and forces, in the sense that there is no absolutereference frame, but the frame itself is bent and transformed bythe bodies that occupy it. Measurements of space are measure-ments of events that happen in space. In contrast, there is apoint of view in which space itself is an entity of interest even inthe absence of anything else: the vacuum is one of the most in-teresting phenomena of modern physics, with its own energy dueto the bubbling of virtual particles. Empty space can be curvedinto interesting and non-trivial geometries, even in the absenceof any actors on its stage of existence.

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In the Still Life of early XX century art, a relational notionof space also comes to play an interesting role. The framingof the scene is no longer an absolute coordinate system, but it iscreated by the relations between objects: their volumes and theirmasses make the space measurable and concrete. In Cezanne’s“Rideau pichet”, the background drapery is no longer just a fixedframe. It becomes another object of the composition, in activedialog with the others. There is no external reference frame,no absolute set of coordinates, other than relative positions andrelative masses. The geometry of space that emerges from theserepresentation, in turn, tends to be curved around the objects,as if they would be bending the surrounding space. Modern artarises on the wake of the late XIX century thinking about space,with the development of curved geometries playing a central rolethat lead to a richer formulation of classical mechanics, wherephase space is naturally curved by the kinetic energy, and pavedthe way to Einstein’s revolution, where it is spacetime itself thatis bent and curved by masses and gravity.

3.3. Matisse’s emergent flat space. A notion that also devel-oped in XX century scientific thought, and which is very much atthe center of current developments in the theory of gravity is theidea that space (or spacetime) need not be a primary concept,but it may instead be an emergent phenomenon, which may beof information theoretic origin.

One may perhaps see traces of an idea of “emergent” spacein Still Life paintings when one looks at how Matisse dealt withthemes and compositional elements very similar to those we justsaw in Cezanne, but approached from a completely different view-point. Space, as represented in Matisse’s paintings, is not tied upto volumes and masses. Everything is perfectly flat and deprived


Figure 25. Matisse, “Still Life with fruit”.

of any reference to 3-dimensionality, and yet space emerges fromrelations and interactions, not of spatial locations, but of colors.Thus, in Matisse’s approach, it is the spectrum of light, with thecontrast created by juxtaposed masses of color that creates space.

From a scientific viewpoint, it would appear that color, whichmeans light and electromagnetism, has little to do with space,which means gravity, and yet that is clearly not the case in Ein-stein’s theory of relativity. Not only because Maxwell’s equationsof electromagnetism are already intrinsically relativistic, but alsobecause light bends with gravity and the properties of light, likeits finite propagation speed, are crucial to determining propertiesof spacetime in relativity theory.

Of course, this brief excursion into modern physics and relativ-ity, is far remote to what had been on Matisse’s mind in creatinghis color based emergent space, and it is only meant to bring to

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Figure 26. Matisse, “Still Life with blue table-cloth”, 1909.

Figure 27. Matisse, “Blue Still Life”, 1907.


the attention of the reader the fact that our modern scientific un-derstanding of space and time is connected to light just as muchas it is connected to gravity.

More to the point of the discussion of the Matisse paintings,it is worth mentioning that our visual perception of light andcolors very often contributes substantially to generate our ownsubjective and psychological perception of space.

3.4. The Cubist spacetime. Much has been said about thepossible relations between the development of the Cubist move-ment in modern art and the almost simultaneous developmentof the two main pillars of modern physics: relativity and quan-tum theory. Although it is generally understood that there wasno direct influence of the scientific texts on the group of artists,it seems that a body of scientific knowledge that precedes thosedevelopments and that was very actively popularized in the lateXIX century, having to do with curved spaces and higher dimen-sions, might have reached the art world more directly, by thetime Cubism began to flourish.

What appears certainly true is that some of the concepts aboutspace and time that were being discussed actively by the Cubistartists were also at the same time receiving a lot of attentionwithin the development of relativity theory. Among these, theconcept of simultaneity. A typical Cubist painting exhibits asubject seen simultaneously from the point of view of many ob-servers in different spatial and temporal positions. Shapes ap-pear broken and superimposed on themselves; the scene is staticand at the same time it evolves. Most significantly, perhaps, thestrict distinction between space and time appears to be broken.Of course, we cannot help but look at these paintings from theperspective of our modern post-relativist conceptions, hence it

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Figure 28. Braques, “Still Life with violin andjug”, 1910.

is natural for us to see in them a portrait of spacetime, ratherthan a space and time, and one where the notion of simultaneousobservers is brought into question.


Figure 29. Picasso, “Still Life with bottle ofrum”, 1911.

3.5. Dadaism: spacetime as information. The Still Life genrealso makes an appearance in one of the most unlikely placeswithin the landscape of the XX century avant-garde: Dadaism.

Within Dadaism Still Life becomes conceptualized and abstract.The space defined by a Still Life composition is a purely infor-mational space. The shapes are no longer, or barely, belongingto everyday objects, and when they are, these have undergonea process of redefinition that alienates them from their everydayrole and renders them unrecognizable, except as concepts.

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Figure 30. Morandi, “Still Life”, 1918.

When Morandi, before turning to his better known realisticStill Lifes, composed his early Dadaist Still Life in 1918, he def-initely created a vision of space. Three abstract shapes float


Figure 31. Man Ray, “Still Life”, 1933.

suspended inside a frame. Space perception, thickness and vol-ume, are generated through the artifact of shadows, that eachshape, as well as the frame itself, cast upon a background wall,whose existence is only highlighted by its role as the recipient ofthe projected shadows. The shapes are purely abstract and yet,the central one, which mediates between the curved and the flat,

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is vaguely reminiscent of a chess piece. The relational positionsbetween these shapes, which complete an invisible triangle de-lineated by the shadow lines on the floor, is what generates theperception of a dynamical form of space.

Equally interesting is Man Ray’s take on the Still Life theme,where a tabletop composition of elements appears to fit moreclosely within the traditional compositional rules of the genre.Yet the objects themselves are highly conceptualized shapes, withmathematical polyhedra (in themselves an excellent representa-tion of space, also used in the old paintings, see the Holbeinexample we discussed earlier), accompanied by an assortment oflightbulbs, children toys, mannequin hands. More than a StillLife this is of course a portrait, a self portrait translated into adadaist reconfiguration of the language of Still Life painting. Assuch, it should perhaps be regarded more as a representation ofan inner space rather than an external physical one.

3.6. Theoretical spacetimes. As the art movements of the XXcentury arose and evolved, one after the other, they hardly everforgot the power that the Still Life composition has to providean arena for philosophical discussions about the notions of spaceand time, and a conceptual laboratory for theoretical models ofrepresentation.

De Chirico, whose art movement is termed “Metaphysics”, de-voted considerable attention to the concept of space, especiallythrough his famous perspectives of solitude in monumental ur-ban spaces. He also adopted the Still Life language to addressthe question of space representation, with instruments of mathe-matical measurement balancing on a tabletop that appears tiltedat a sliding angle, crowned by a perspective fugue through a tri-angular window at the back, and paying homage to the history of


Figure 32. De Chirico, “Still Life”.

the genre with his Cezanne-like voluminous shapes of fruits occu-pying and defining the center of the composition. The referencewithin the reference is hinted at by the presence of a Still Lifepainting of grapes within the Still Life painting, the representa-tion of a representation, or a second level of conceptualization.

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3.7. Cornell’s cosmic dioramas. It is finally with the assem-blage works of Joseph Cornell that the notion of space definedby the relational positions of Still Life compositions merges withspace in the cosmic sense, the outer space of astronomical andcosmological vastness. Confined within and extremely narrowlydefined frame, that of a box, the cosmic dioramas of Joseph Cor-nell explode this reference frame into perspectives of cosmic scale.The confined space of the boxes is transformed into windowsopened upon vistas of constellations and galaxies and a vertigo ofdepth of astronomical distances. Yet, at the same time, the newelements brought in to refer to modern science, through graphicsand stellar charts, blend with compositions of glasses and corksand cutup newspapers, all well established elements in the earlyXX century vocabulary of Still Life compositions.

Thus, by the time of the 1970s, modern art was using the latestincarnation of the Still Life genre to connect to visions of spacepopularized by astronomy and cosmology. The debate on thestructure of space continued to undergo very fervent bursts ofactivity in mathematics, physics and cosmology, all through theXX and now into the XXI century. Cornell has shown us thatvisions of space at the cosmic scale are not incompatible with agenre of artistic expression that was born in the Dutch kitchens ofthe XVII century. We await similar artistic expressions tacklingthe scientific visions of space at the infinitesimally small scales,where high energy physics dwells, and the varieties of space struc-tures developed and explored by modern mathematics1.

1This essay was prepared and printed for distribution as reading materialaccompanying a lecture. The illustrations are reproduced under fair uselimitations, for nonprofit educational purposes only.


Figure 33. Joseph Cornell, “Eclipsing BinargyBox”, 1972

Figure 34. Joseph Cornell, “Assemblage”.

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MATILDE MARCOLLI - California Institute of Technologymatilde/StillLifeSpacetime.pdf · 4 MATILDE MARCOLLI 2. Time and transience As it is well known, ... method to store acoustically